1: Go to an enemys home-planet and attack each city until you see a little white flag upon the city. After you make all of them white flags you click capture system.P.S: To get the white flag use a weapon that isnt so powerful so you dont demolish the city. Also make sure that you use some kind of happines booster or put entertaiment centers in the cities beacuse after you them up so much they will get mad about their jobs and so on so forth

2. Establish a trade route whit a civilzations home-planet so that when its finished you can buy the solar system.

[Edited by mariux_atlas, 11/21/2008 5:38:08 PM]

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There's a mod somewhere that lets you capture 100% of the time without blowing up the cities.

Something to note, however, is that the cities' spice output on home planets increases as you blow up other cities. That is to say, they had 54 spice/hour before you blew one up, afterward all the rest have 60 or so.

The only big advantage to having 10 cities rather than 6 or 7 is defensively you've got much better coverage, and that's not that big an advantage unless you get invaded by the Grox in hard mode.

Also, there is NO reliable way to avoid destroying cities. There's a random chance when you take one over that a white flag will go up or the city goes kerplowie. The exception to this seems to be the antimatter bomb, which tends to result in blown up cities much more often than any other weapon.

It is quite profitable and fun to seed species and monoliths on valuable spice worlds - think pink and purple - and conquer/buy/convert them once they get to the space stage. You get 10 cities and with the storage upgrade that's 100 spice per trip. Do that for at least one of every color of spice and you will never want for sporebucks in the game, ever. (Say you find a buyer for purple at 70,000, not hard, and sell 100 for 7 million per trip. 5 mil for pink, 3-5 for green and purple, etc. Emptying 100 of all colors will net you 20 million easy.)

This trick is also useful for getting the warmonger and associated badges without depopulating large tracts of space or screwing up your ability to get the friendly badges as well.

Once you place a monolith the system will never be taken by another empire, and a monolith costs $250,000 as opposed to 1.8 million to fully outfit 3 cities on a T3 planet. You essentially get 10 cities (optimally) for the cost of a monolith, plus whatever you paid for weapons or buying the system. (It's worth it to buy the system due to the extreme spice production, I don't recommend combat as it hurts your bottom line and spice capacity.)